The increasing complexity of the relationships among business entities has led to the rising demand for improved event publication and subscription systems. In many business situations, a business entity may want to be notified when a certain event occurs, for example, when a purchase order arrives. The entity may also want to be notified in a particular manner, for example, by receiving an e-mail message about the event. The entity may not need information regarding the other entity that produced the event, and may only need information that the event occurred and perhaps information about the event itself. Event subscription and publication may be used to request or to send notification of an event. To request notification, an event consumer may subscribe to an event manager for a particular event. The event manager monitors an event producer to see if the event occurs. When the event occurs, the event manager notifies the event consumer by publishing the event to the event consumer in the manner specified by the event consumer.
While known approaches have provided improvements over prior approaches, the challenges in the field of computers and computer databases have continued to increase with demands for more and better techniques having greater flexibility and effectiveness. Therefore, a need has arisen for a new method and system for managing event publication and subscription.